Friday, March 15, 2019

A hunk, a horse, mist on the hills, and a golden dawn...


Images like this look great on your phone as wallpaper -- I've been playing with my 5.5" Android and am still grinning at the result! Give it a shot, see what you think. (To download to your phone, all you should need to do is press and hold on the image till a pop-up menu appears. Then select "download image," and go through the routine to set it as a wallpaper. It's dead easy in Android ... enjoy! Don't know how it works on the iThings: never owned one, sorry.)

Or, if you prefer images in the  landscape format ...


As you can tell, am having loads of fun with the horse at the moment. The model, you might remember from a few years ago. He appeared as the Hyborean Age Calendar Dude, and even before that in a couple of other places, other guises. I like this body/face morph, and he wears the SAV Atlas skinmap beautifully. (The only thing I do to adapt the Atlas map is to crank up the glossiness and specular values, because the skinmap is very, very "matte" ... so matte, the guy looks like velvet, or suede.)

Been playing in Terragen, too. I wanted to see if I could do mist or fog (atmospherics), and I found two ways to do it! Here's one of them:


That one, above, is the most natural shot. It's like you're standing on a ridge line, looking out over misty, forested hills. There's another way to do it, too, but I didn't get to that today: tomorrow. Also...


Golden Dawn. The truth is, in Terragen it's soooo easy to do sunset and dawn shots. The clever(ish) thing about this one is the rocky foreground. I discovered something called a "displacement shader" that allows you to lay down a bed of rocks without importing anything. It's all done with a surface texture map. Neat. I had a quick look at depth of field, but didn't bother today, because I'll be darned if I can see any way to tell the program where to pull focus. It has to be there, but I'm just not seeing it yet. Will figure it out tomorrow.

Must head for bed now: getting sooo tired.So I'll leave you with this: now, there's pretty. I didn't paint the mane and tail on the horse -- thank CWRW for that one; but I did paint the hair on the guy. Juuust starting to get good at this. (You know the line in the movie, "What is it with chicks and horses?" ...!)